Who Will Protect the Crimean Tatars?

At first, Rustem Kadyrov could barely make out the mark outside his house, in the Crimean town of Bakhchysarai, but it filled him with terror. It was an X, cut deep into the gray metal of the gate, and its significance cut even deeper, evoking a memory Kadyrov shares with all Crimean Tatars. Kadyrov, who is thirty-one, grew up hearing stories about marks on doors. In May of 1944, Stalin ordered his police to tag the houses of Crimean Tatars, the native Muslim residents of the peninsula. Within a matter of days, all of them—almost two hundred thousand people—were evicted from their homes, loaded onto trains, and sent to Central Asia, on the pretext that the community had collaborated with the Nazi occupation of Crimea.

Kadyrov’s grandmother, Sedeka Memetova, who was eight at the time, was among those deported. “The soldiers gave us five minutes to pack up,” she told me, when I visited the family on Thursday. “We left everything behind.” Memetova still has vivid memories of her journey into exile: the stench of the overcrowded train carriage, the wailing of a pregnant woman who sat next to her, and the solemn faces of the men who had to lower the bodies of their children off of the moving train—the only way, she said, to dispose of the dead. Four of her siblings were among the thousands of Crimean Tatars who never even made it to their final destination, Uzbekistan.

Starting in the nineteen-sixties, the Soviet Union began to allow survivors of the deportation to return. Memetova and her family came back to Crimea almost three decades ago, in 1987. This weekend, at around 3 P.M. on Saturday, Memetova’s forty-four-year-old daughter, Ava, looked out the window and saw four young men, strangers to the neighborhood, walking down the street, armed with batons. The men were also carrying pieces of paper, Ava told me—which she believes were lists of homes belonging to Crimean Tatars. Seventy years after Memetova’s deportation, her house had been marked once again. “Just as we thought we finally had a future,” she said. “How could anyone do this in the twenty-first century?”

When I walked up Chiisty Istochniki Street from the Memetovas’ house, I saw similar marks on four other houses, all of them residences of Crimean Tatars, Kadyrov said. The houses of their Russian neighbors, however, had not been touched. Similar markings have been reported in other parts of Bakhchysarai, and in some areas of the regional capital, Simferopol. Kadyrov told me that he called the police, who came out see his gate, but they refused to register a case. He was not surprised. “The police will not help us,” he said. “They told me Crimean Tatars are not a priority for them. Of course not—they are punishing us because we do not want Putin here.”

Kadyrov’s Russian neighbors have noticed the markings but dismissed his worries. “Whoever did it was just joking,” one woman, who did not wish to be named, told me. “We get along with our neighbors fine,” she continued. “But it would be helpful if Crimean Tatars stopped supporting Kiev.”

Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, claims that his country has an obligation to protect the Crimean peninsula’s Russians, a majority of its population, from what he called an “orgy of nationalists, and extremists, and anti-Semites” rampaging through the streets of Kiev. “What does that mean for us?” Kadyrov asked. “Who will protect us?”

Crimea is now firmly under the control of a new, pro-Moscow government, which does not recognize the authority of the new administration in Kiev. On Thursday, as the United States and European Union ramped up pressure on the Kremlin—announcing sanctions and visa restrictions against involved individuals—the regional parliament in Crimea voted unanimously to declare the peninsula part of Russia. A previously scheduled referendum on more autonomy for Crimea within Ukraine was moved up from March 30th to March 16th, and changed to a question about merging Crimea with Russia.

There are about three hundred thousand Crimean Tatars on the peninsula, and although they constitute only fifteen per cent of its population they have great political significance. If they do not back the upcoming referendum, it will be far more difficult for the pro-Moscow government in Crimea to legitimize what is in effect a Russian annexation of the peninsula. This, Crimean Tatars told me, is precisely why pressure is growing for them to turn their back on Kiev.

Over the past week, Moscow has sent a series of delegations to meet with the leaders of the Crimean Tatar community. On Wednesday, the President of Tatarstan, an autonomous Muslim republic in Russia, met with members of the representative body of Crimean Tatars, known as the Mejlis. Another member of his delegation, Ilshat Aminov—the head of Tatarstan’s state broadcaster—paid a visit on the same day to the journalists at a Crimean Tatar television channel, ATR, which has been openly supportive of the new government in Kiev.

I happened to be at ATR when Aminov arrived. His laughter echoed through the newsroom as he walked around, praising the station’s modern equipment and avoiding any discussion of the news. When I asked Aminov about the reason for his visit, he said, simply, “I am here to support my brothers in a time of trouble.” Linur Yunusov, a senior journalist at ATR, told me that while no Russian official had ever bothered to visit Crimean Tatars before, Moscow was now sending one delegation after another. “This sudden brotherly love is overwhelming,” he joked.

At one point, a journalist inside the newsroom called Aminov’s attention to a television screen, which showed masked Russian soldiers blocking the entrance to a military base outside Simferopol. “This is our live position,” the journalist said, provocatively. “A perfect view of the Russian occupation.” Aminov didn’t take the bait. “Which editing software do you use?” he replied.

The delegates visiting from Russia have made many promises to the Crimean Tatars to solicit their political support: seats in the new government, financial assistance, official language rights, and rural-development programs. These offers resonate, particularly as the community feels that its plight has been largely ignored by the government in Kiev for the past quarter century. Many Crimean Tatars remain bitterly disappointed that Kiev has not delivered on its many promises to pass laws that would recognize victims of Stalin’s deportation or establish Crimean Tatar-language schools.

“We are on a verge of losing our culture, our language, our identity,” Yunusov, the senior journalist, told me. And yet, like most of the Crimean Tatars I have interviewed, he believes that the community will be safer if the peninsula remains part of Ukraine. “For us, a European Ukraine is the only way of making sure that we survive as people,” he said. “We need European laws to protect our identity. After what happened in 1944, we can never trust the Russians.”

Eskandar Baiibov, a deputy in the Crimean Tatar Mejlis, told me firmly that his community is unanimous in its backing for the government in Kiev, and that Crimean Tatars would boycott any referendum on joining Russia. But he is also terrified, he admitted, of the price that they might have to pay for refusing to give the Kremlin the support it wants.

“We are already seeing signs that they are trying to intimidate us, to split us, to stir trouble,” Baiibov said. “Ukrainians are also vulnerable, but at least they have Ukraine to go to. Where will we go? Crimea is our only home.” After the regional parliament voted to merge Crimea into Russia on Thursday, the chairman of the Mejlis, Refat Chubarov, released a statement to the press, calling for the United Nations to “immediately consider” sending a contingent of international peacekeepers into Crimea, “in order to deëscalate the military conflict … which can lead to mass casualties among the entire civilian population of the peninsula.”

But the prospect of U.N. peacekeepers landing on the peninsula anytime soon is less than slim. And so, as Crimea prepares for a referendum on its future, its native people are preparing for the worst. In Bakhchysarai, Ava’s husband has cut up metal rods and placed them throughout the house so the family can use them to fight off any possible intruders. The men of Chiisty Istochniki Street now take turns patrolling the neighborhood at night, and Rustem Kadyrov has applied for travel documents for his children.

“Many of us want to get wives and children out of here, to somewhere safe,” Kadyrov told me. The men, he said, will stay.

Above: Crimean Tatars hold a rally near the parliament building in Simferopol. Photograph by Baz Ratner/Reuters.